A Very Private Celebrity (14 page)

Since that Christmas, Ena's relationship with Driberg had gone from bad to worse. Weekends alone at Bradwell Lodge were spent
in moody silence. He insisted that she slept at the other end of the house, while he played endless games of solo canasta and communicated with her by notes. She felt lonely, humiliated and prepared to separate. It was Freeman who dissuaded her, by pointing out what a bad effect separation would have on Tom ‘professionally and socially'. So she agreed to stay, on the following conditions:

The Freemans spent other weekends with Lord Faringdon, a leading member of the Fabian Society. He was a gay friend of Tom Driberg's, known for his effeminate ways such as opening a speech in the House of Lords with ‘My dears' instead of ‘My Lords'. He was also a supporter of left-wing causes. At his country estate Buscot Park, prominent refugees from Franco's Spain could find themselves with the Bevanite group holding a policy weekend. ‘During this time, Freeman cultivated his taste for fine wines, which he'd established at Oxford and continued in the Driberg cellar. In September 1952, he sent his host a postcard from Bordeaux:

This particular visit led to a series of articles for the
New Statesman
. When Freeman became editor he would bring in wine corks after a particularly fine meal and invite his team to enjoy the fragrance.

By the time of the general election in May 1955, Freeman had had enough. He had made his intention clear not to stand again at Watford and he turned down a last-minute invitation to become Labour MP for Durham. Apart from disliking the job, he had a political reason for leaving Parliament. The phrase of 1954 was ‘Butskellism', meaning a convergence of middle-of-the-road policies by the two Chancellors of the Exchequer, the Conservative Rab Butler and Labour's Hugh Gaitskell. This amounted to bi-party approval for a Keynesian mixed economy, with moderate state intervention to promote social goals, particularly in health and education. It was debated at the Labour Party conference in Scarborough and Freeman was strongly opposed to it:

A powerful statement and a political epitaph.

Just before the election, Freeman vented his frustration in an article for the
New Statesman
called ‘Night Thoughts of an Ex-MP'. He began: ‘My principal thought at this time is one of thankful relief.' There follows a carefully balanced article, in which the reader is left waiting for the sting in the tail. He said he would miss his daily companions, who would change into distant friends, and, above all, he would miss his sense of being at the centre of things: ‘It is the community of interest in power and responsibility, which pervades the Commons, that makes it, outside the formalities of the debating chamber, the very best of talking shops.'

Then comes the sting – Freeman's vision of his future if he stayed:

Freeman told Edward Hyams, a colleague at the
New Statesman
, that he had detested parliamentary life. He considered his ten years as an
MP to have been worse than his five years as a soldier. Freeman had done his best, but ultimately ended his career because Parliament had not been to his taste.

In 1964, when Labour was planning its return to power after thirteen years in the wilderness, Freeman was asked by his old friends Barbara Castle and Richard Crossman, who would both become Cabinet ministers, if he would consider standing for Parliament again, if he was guaranteed a place in the Cabinet. He refused.

Could Freeman have become Prime Minister? This, of course, is impossible to answer. He did, in my view, fulfil most of his own prescription: ‘The great political leader requires not only the courage, ability and integrity of the statesman; he must also understand intuitively the emotions, prejudices and ambitions of fools and rascals. Paradoxically, he must contain in himself something of the rascal and something of the fool.'
32
No one could call Freeman a fool, but nor did he tolerate fools. Nor would he have enjoyed the scheming, public performances and confrontation that the Prime Minister's role required. He was, nevertheless, an outstanding leader – in the army, in politics, in diplomacy and in business.

Endorsements for the top job came from an impressive variety of those who knew him well, from the elder statesman Dr Henry Kissinger (‘He would have made a great Prime Minister') to a fellow government minister at the time, Woodrow Wyatt (‘He could have been Prime Minister but he disdained the grubby atmosphere of political life') to the comedian Tony Hancock, who gave him the vote of the man in the street (‘He should have been Prime Minister'). Paul Johnson, who succeeded Freeman as editor of the
New Statesman
, told me:

Had he not resigned, it is very easy to see him as a senior member of Wilson's Cabinet, perhaps as Foreign Secretary, on a par with his friend Tony Crosland. After that, there is no point in speculation: I was told with certainty that he did not vote Labour again after 1966.

In fact, much later in his life when he was teaching at UC Davis in California (see Chapter 12), he said he regretted the radical left views of his earlier years – ‘they did a lot of harm'. This is an admission to ponder.

Chapter 5

Television interviewer –
Panorama

W
HEN FREEMAN WAS
asked by Nigel Lawson in the 1990s why he had not written his autobiography, he replied that he would have been too rude about too many people. However, if there was one person Freeman admired and praised without qualification it was Grace Wyndham Goldie. She was the founder of the new-look BBC TV programme
Panorama
, which came on air on 19 September 1955. In his biography of her,
The First Lady of Television
, John Grist writes:

Grace Wyndham Goldie was fifty-five in 1955. Her civil service type title (assistant head of talks television) was evidence of how fundamentally un-visual factual television was in those days – a radio-led, outmoded practice she was determined to change. It was a misleading title, too, because Grace was assistant to nobody. She had to be in charge of any activity she was engaged in, so her boss Leonard Miall wisely gave her the task of launching new projects. First and foremost was
Panorama
.

Wyndham Goldie was fearsome. A future director-general, Sir Ian Trethowan, wrote: ‘Her sharp tongue and angry snapping eyes were feared and disliked by newer and more junior members of her staff, but older hands held her in deep respect, even awe.'
2
She was a workaholic who demanded total commitment – ‘If you don't dream about television every night you are no use to me!' – and her moods were so unpredictable that she was said to rule ‘with a whim of iron'.

Her biographer, John Grist, who also worked with her in the 1950s, gives an insider's picture of Grace Wyndham Goldie at an editorial meeting (a BBC institution that anyone who has worked there knows may determine success or failure):

Catherine Dove (later Freeman), then a young producer in her department, remembers Grace as:

Pre-eminent among ‘Goldie's boys' were a handful of former junior ministers from the post-war Labour governments, who had left Parliament between 1950–55, just when television factual programmes were on the cusp of change and needing new-look reporters and interviewers. John Freeman was one of them. Now forty, and despite his record of high achievement in both the army and politics, he was probably not averse to being a Goldie boy.

Others Goldie boys were Christopher Mayhew (once under-secretary of Foreign Affairs), Aidan Crawley (Air) and Woodrow Wyatt (who had been given Freeman's post of under-secretary in the War Office after Freeman had moved to the Ministry of Supply). The difference between Freeman and the others was that, while they returned to politics in the 1960s, he never went back. However, what they all shared, in Grace Wyndham Goldie's view, was ‘a cross-bench mind'. Mayhew moved from the Labour to the Liberal Party; Crawley crossed the floor and became a Conservative MP (before leaving politics and
becoming chairman of London Weekend Television); and Wyatt became a thorn in the side of the Labour Party, with very right-wing views. Freeman, in her words, ‘abandoned the party political scene, became editor of the
New Statesman
and, in the television series
Face to Face
, showed interviewing skills comparable to Edward R. Murrow in the United States'. None had any problem being fair and impartial. She sensed in all of them disillusionment with party politics:

All in all, Grace Wyndham Goldie was delighted. They were superior in every way to the ‘dirty-mac brigade' of journalists, which she despised. The problem, of course, was of perceived political bias. Where were the former leading lights of the Conservative Party?

Winston Churchill, for one, asked this question in May 1953, when Aidan Crawley was in India with his wife Virginia Cowles, filming what became the six-part television series
India's Challenge
. Grace Wyndham Goldie was able to report that Crawley was no longer a Labour MP, nor was he a prospective Labour candidate, so the obligation for ‘balance' did not apply.

However, Conservative pressure mounted and Grace shared the BBC's anxiety. The trouble, she reported, was that ‘television in itself did not interest the Conservatives'. Many former Tory MPs were businessmen who earned much higher salaries than the BBC could ever offer. Furthermore, while they were prepared to air their views, they did not seem to be interested in the role of expositor or moderator. One Conservative councillor (on the London county council for Lewisham) did present himself: Christopher Chataway spent three years as a Goldie boy before becoming a Conservative MP.

The first reporter for the new-look
Panorama
(one or two models had failed before) was Woodrow Wyatt. His film test had been a disaster: ‘I looked like a stuffed pig and recoiled from this revelation of myself as someone I should hate to hear or see.' Catherine Dove, the first woman on the
Panorama
production team, said he reminded her more of Toad of Toad Hall. However, he persisted and filmed a twenty-minute report on Malta for the opening edition, although he was not sure what to do when he got to Malta:

So began the longest-running and most prestigious of TV factual programmes. It was not, strictly speaking, ‘current affairs'; more, in the words of its first producer Michael Peacock, ‘a reflection of everyday life – ships, jazz, people, ploughing, theatre, industry, art, books, buildings, or bulldozers'. A ‘window on the world', as it called itself
in those early days, its mission was to introduce serious subjects to a popular audience – the heart of public service broadcasting.

Wyatt's ‘piece to camera' in Malta was, surprisingly, a bit of a breakthrough, because most foreign factual coverage on television in the early 1950s had been confined to the programme
Newsreel
– and that had consisted mostly of silent film shot by a cameraman, to which a commentary would be added back home and then voiced out of vision, rather like a TV version of the cinema's
Look at Life
. Grace Wyndham Goldie said that in those early days of
Newsreel
she used to throw onto the cutting-room floor chocolate-box pictures of cherry orchards in flower, or girls in local costume, or flocks of bleating lambs, because they offered nothing ‘to a study, say, of the relationship between Yugoslavia and the USSR'. The cameraman might not have been briefed at all on the story – if one had even been decided – before he set out for foreign parts. No doubt this is partly why Grace was experimenting at the time with
Viewfinder
, which saw Aidan Crawley and Christopher Mayhew send back ‘illustrated reports on world affairs'. Meanwhile,
Newsreel
passed from the film department to the TV and radio news department – from the former, which knew nothing about content, to the latter, which knew nothing about the visual requirements of television. The news department – dubbed by the next director-general, Hugh Carleton Greene, as ‘the Kremlin of the BBC' – was under the reactionary ‘dictatorship' of Tahu Hole, the head of news. His enemy was the visual, so on BBC television news, nothing moved. The only things television news was allowed to add to a radio broadcast were a clock, the BBC coat of arms, a few captions and some still photographs. Such was the dread of the cult of personality that, up until September 1955 (three weeks before ITV began), TV newsreaders like Richard Baker and Kenneth Kendall were neither seen nor identified. In 1954, the
Star
newspaper called TV news ‘about as impressive visually as the fatstock prices'.

All this is one way of saying that Grace Wyndham Goldie and
Panorama
were kicking against an open door. In the mid-1950s, broadcasting was still in the age of radio. The night ITV began transmitting, just three days after Woodrow Wyatt's
Panorama
, the BBC Light Programme station scooped an audience of eight million, with the death of Grace Archer on, of course, the ever-running soap opera
The Archers
. The radio reviewer of
The Guardian
summed it up the next morning:

One of
Panorama
's most important running stories in those early days was the exposure by Woodrow Wyatt of communist vote rigging, first in the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) and then in the Electrical Trades Union (ETU). John Freeman took over from Wyatt and it was his interview with the communist president of the ETU in 1960 that became one of the most controversial in the history of
Panorama
.

In 1957, Wyatt obtained masses of confidential documents from the one remaining full-time, non-communist official in the ETU, Jock Byrne, which proved that, since the war, the communist membership had falsified election returns. By December 1957, he had compiled a
devastating report, with the help of Norman MacKenzie. The director-general of the BBC gave his approval for the exposure on
Panorama
. This was a brave move, because the TV studios depended on the ETU to get their programmes on air. Wyatt had to resort to what has now become accepted practice:

‘In last week's sizzling
Panorama
,' wrote Maurice Wiggins in the
Sunday Times
:

The next year Wyatt left
Panorama
to return to politics. It fell to John Freeman to complete what Wyatt had begun. Following another
Panorama
report, in which non-communist local officials made further allegations about ETU vote rigging, on 22 February 1960, Frank
Foulkes, the communist president, finally came in to the
Panorama
studio. The interviewer was John Freeman.